Overview

At the time of writing, 1339 projects have been identified worldwide. Of these:

• 1188 projects are hosted on GitHub,

• 27 on GitLab and

• 125 on other websites or self-hosted Git platforms.

We found 996 active project repositories in total on GitHub. A project is considered active if the public repository has at least one commit or closed issue within the last year. We have excluded inactive projects from our analysis as their inclusion would distort current trends. The listed inactive open source projects are those that have become inactive since data collection began two years ago. The statistics on all active and inactive projects in the table below are based on the raw dataset. Unless otherwise noted, all following plots in the study always refer to the active projects.

Fig. 11
Statistics on all active and inactive projects

Open source projects are grouped into fields based on their primary topic of focus. While the boundaries often overlap, these fields help to paint a broad landscape and can provide insight into the ecosystem health and complexity of fields relative to each other. The following sunburst diagram shows the relationship between fields, topics, and projects. The colour represents the Development Distribution Score.

Tip

The plot is fully interactive. Drill into fields, topics, and projects via hovering your mouse! Click on the project names to jump to the repositories.

Fig. 12
All studied projects grouped into the corresponding fields and topics

The following scatter plot provides an overview of all projects studied. The size of the circles is proportional to the relative scale of the projects, based on total commits and contributions. The colour bar shows the Development Distribution Score (DDS) as a measure of the distribution of work among the individual developers. A high value indicates a high distribution of work and, thus, a strong developer community. More details about this can be found in chapter Development Distribution Score.

Fig. 13
Overview of all projects of the last 14 years since the launch of GitHub

This overview depicts how projects within specific topics have evolved over time. Early diverse developments can be seen in fields such as biosphere, photovoltaics, mobility, and transportation. Other fields, such as carbon intensity and accounting, or computation and communication, have recently emerged. More information can be found in the chapter Growth. We can also see that the majority of OSS developments emerged rapidly approximately three years ago. Newer projects are getting fewer and fewer, which is examined in greater detail in the chapter on Age.